So I’ve been getting back in to revo after a while, and here’s my notes from the learning experience. I’m not going to debate back and forth about the virtues of various features, but I do hope that maybe this will be useful at least somewhat as feedback. Once again, its great software that makes me very happy and I hope to continue using for a long time, and these are just lots of little things
Note that a lot of these are little issues that could be considered ’stupid’. But you should be able to be stupid and still navigate the interface easily. That way you can put mental energies towards other things instead. (I hesitate to mention it, but mac products are generally a good example of this).
Counterintuitivities:
- Template variable - Using input: image and output: html tag does not create an img tag.
- TV - Quick update should allow template assignments.
- Nomenclature of ’edit’ and ’update’, from edit resource/quick update. Both of them mean edit, only one is quick. They should be the same word.
- Having right click -> edit doesn’t make any sense. Thats what left click is for. Its too easy to end up editing when looking for quick edit (and not seeing it, because the word update is used..)
- why would there be hover help for the well known Content Type but not some mysterious ’modDocument’ ’Class Key’?
- mysterious errors, reminiscent of windows 95: when trying to delete the page named ’home’, it says: "The resource is ’Site start’ and cannot be deleted!". Confusing, because the page is named home and the message, if one does not know about the setting, seems to indicate that the page is now named ’Site Start’. It should at least say where to find site start, which is buried in pages of (ajax-slow) settings. I had to find a thread about this one:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=1457.0
- Site settings and manager settings are quite different and should not be in the same menu topic. Especially if one doesn’t know site settings exist, one assumes the page is all just manager settings.
- There’s this nice list of top-popular packages. Unfortunately, you can’t click on them.
- Had to go in to settings and turn on friendly alias path and auto generate friendly aliases in order to have wayfinder show any text. Don’t know why, but it shouldn’t be necessary, or should at least be mentioned obviously.
Interface Glitches:
- Template variable - changing output type did not activate the save button.
- The tree collapsed after creating a template variable. This makes no sense, as an empty tree is not useful. At least TVs or some such should have been open?
- After editing the ’site start’ setting, the description box was empty..
- Whenever I use the package manager, the next button doesn’t work after selecting a provider. Always have to reload the page and then it works.
- Grey dropshadows remaining sometimes after closing a dialog.
- Random grey bar across the bottom of the screen all the time. Double click and it goes away.
- To use the dropdown for a setting, I double click. which hides the help. Opening the help again hides the select box. Can’t see the select box and the help for the select box at the same time.
- If you create a new page and the first thing you do is change template, it warns you that you’ll lose all your work. Wasted click.
- if you quick update a resource that already open in full-edit, the tree gets refreshed but open resource does not. This wouldn’t be a problem if the save button always worked with full-edit. (Thats not a problem with quick update, because the button doesn’t disable).
- After saving a chunk, save button doesn’t deactivate.
- tried to open chunks in the tree while the manager was loading for the first time. Instead, the chunks arrow broke and didn’t open. Had to reload manager.
General Improvements:
- Ajax is nice but still slow. HTML5 caching could be implemented all over the place, to show stale data while new data is loading. (Such as tree, which most of the time would be fine)
- Like syntax highlighting, when going inside [[__]] brackets, it would be really cool if there was an indicator saying whether its TV, chuck variable, snippet, chunk, link, cached, uncached, whatever else. Would be great for catching horrible newbie mistakes.
- Javascript syntax checking would be really nice.
